Travelers of Space - [Adventures in Science Fiction 03]

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  He wrote: “The fact that ships based on this planet could strike at several of the most densely populated areas of the galaxy, Rull or human, gives it an AA priority on all available military equipment. Preliminary defense units should be set up on Mount Monolith, where I am now, within three we—”

  It was at that point that he saw the other boat, above and somewhat to his left, approaching the tableland. He glanced up at it—and froze where he was, torn between two opposing purposes.

  His first impulse, to run for the lifeboat, yielded to the realization that the movement would be seen instantly by the electronic reflexes of the other ship. For a moment, then, he had the dim hope that, if he remained quiet enough, neither he nor his ship would be observed.

  Even as he sat there, perspiring with indecision, his tensed eyes noted the Rull markings and the rakish design of the other vessel. His vast knowledge of things Rull enabled him to catalogue it instantly as a survey craft.

  A survey craft. The Rulls had discovered the Laertes sun.

  The terrible potentiality was that, behind this small craft, might be fleets of battleships, whereas he was alone. His own lifeboat had been dropped by the Orion nearly a parsec away, while the big ship was proceeding at antigravity speeds. That was to insure that Rull energy tracers did not record its passage through this area of space.

  The Orion was to head for the nearest base, load up with planetary defense equipment, and return. She was due in ten days.

  Ten days. Jamieson groaned inwardly, and drew his legs under him and clenched his survey book in the fingers of one hand. But still the possibility his ship, partially hidden under a clump of trees, might escape notice if he remained quiet, held him there in the open. His head tilted up, his eyes glared at the alien, and his brain willed it to turn aside.

  ~ * ~

  Once more, flashingly, while he waited, the implications of the disaster that could be here, struck deep. In all the universe there had never been so dangerous an intelligence as the Rull. At once remorseless and immune to all attempts at establishing communication, Rulls killed human beings on sight. A human-manned warship that ventured into Rull-patrolled space was attacked until it withdraw or was destroyed. Rull ships that entered Earth-controlled space never withdrew once they were attacked. In the beginning, man had been reluctant to engage in a death struggle for the galaxy. But the inexorable enemy had forced him finally to match in every respect the tenacious and murderous policies of the Rull.

  The thought ended. The Rull ship was a hundred yards away, and showed no signs of changing its course. In seconds, it would cross the clump of trees, which half-hid the lifeboat.

  In a spasm of a movement, Jamieson launched himself from his chair. Like a shot from a gun, with utter abandon, he dived for the open doorway of his machine. As the door clanged behind him, the boat shook as if it had been struck by a giant. Part of the ceiling sagged; the floor staggered towards him, and the air grew hot and suffocating.

  Gasping, Jamieson slid into the control chair, and struck at the main emergency switch. The rapid fire blasters huzzaed into automatic firing positions, and let go with a hum and deep-throated ping. The refrigerators whined with power; a cold blast of air blew at his body. The relief was so quick that a second passed before Jamieson realized that the atomic engines had failed to respond. And that the lifeboat, which should already have been sliding into the air, was still lying inert in an exposed position.

  Tense, he stared into the visiplates. It took a moment to locate the Rull ship. It was at the lower edge of one plate, tumbling slowly out of sight beyond a clump of trees a quarter of a mile away. As he watched, it disappeared; and then the crash of the landing came clear and unmistakable from the soundboard in front of him.

  The relief that came was weighted with an awful reaction. Jamieson sank back into the cushions of the control chair, weak from the narrowness of his escape. The weakness ended abruptly as a thought struck him. There had been a sedateness about the way the enemy ship fell. The crash hadn’t killed the Rulls aboard.

  He was alone in a damaged lifeboat on an impassable mountain with one or more of the most remorseless creatures ever spawned. For ten days, he must fight in the hope that man would still be able to seize the most valuable planet discovered in a century.

  He saw in his visiplate that it was growing darker outside.

  ~ * ~

  Jamieson opened the door, and went out onto the tableland. He was still trembling with reaction, but there was no time to waste.

  He walked swiftly to the top of the nearest hillock a hundred feet away, taking the last few feet on his hands and knees. Cautiously, he peered over the rim.

  Most of the mountain top was visible. It was a rough oval some eight hundred yards wide at its narrowest, a wilderness of scraggly brush and upjutting rock, dominated here and there by clumps of trees. There was not a movement to be seen, and not a sign of the Rull ship. Over everything lay an atmosphere of desolation, and the utter silence of an uninhabited wasteland.

  The twilight was deeper, now that the sun had sunk below the southwest precipice. And the deadly part was that, to the Rulls, with their wider vision and more complete sensory equipment, the darkness would mean nothing. All night long, he would have to be on the defensive against beings whose nervous systems outmatched his in every function except, possibly, intelligence. On that level, and that alone, human beings claimed equality.

  The very comparison made him realize how desperate his situation was. He needed an advantage. If he could get to the Rull wreck, and cause them some kind of damage before it got pitch dark, before they recovered from the shock of the crash, that alone might make the difference between life and death for him.

  It was a chance he had to take.

  Hurriedly, Jamieson backed down the hillock, and, climbing to his feet, started to run along a shallow wash. The ground was rough with stones and projecting edges of rock and the gnarled roots and tangle of hardy growth. Twice, he fell, the first time gashing his right hand, the second time his right foot.

  It slowed him mentally and physically. He had never before tried to make speed over the pathless wilderness of the tableland. He saw that in ten minutes he had covered a distance of just under seventy-five yards.

  Jamieson stopped. It was one thing to be bold on the chance of making a vital gain. It was quite another to throw away his life on a reckless gamble. The defeat would not be his alone, but man’s.

  As he stood there, he grew aware of how icy cold it had become. A chilling wind from the east had sprung up. By midnight, the temperature would be zero. For it was autumn on Laertes III. Soon, snow would be stinging down on an ever more barren land, and then winter would settle for eight long months. The original exploratory party had extracted from the flora and the fauna, and the soil and the rocks the cyclic secrets of the planet’s existence. And in their two years stay they had mapped the gyrations of every wind, cold and heat source on its uneven surface.

  Jamieson began to retreat. There were several defenses to rig up before night fell; and he had better hurry. An hour later, when the moonless darkness lay heavily over the mountain of mountains, Jamieson sat tensely before his visiplates.

  It was going to be a long night for a man who dared not sleep.

  It was shortly after midnight—Laertes III had a twenty-six hour, sidereal time, day—when Jamieson saw a movement at the remote perimeter of his all-wave vision plate. Finger on blaster control, he waited for the object to come into sharper focus.

  It never did. The cold dawn found him weary but still alertly watching for an enemy that was acting as cautiously as he himself.

  He began to wonder if he had actually seen anything.

  ~ * ~

  Jamieson took another antisleep pill and made a more definite examination of the atomic motors. It didn’t take long to verify his earlier diagnosis. The basic graviton pile had been thoroughly frustrated. Until it could be reactivated on the Orion, the motors were useless.


  The conclusive examination braced Jamieson. He was committed irrevocably to the battle of the tableland, with all its intricate possibilities. The idea that had been turning over in his mind during the prolonged night took on new meaning. This was the first time in his knowledge that a Rull and a human being had faced each other on a limited field of action, where neither was a prisoner. The great battles in space were ship against ship and fleet against fleet. Survivors either escaped or were picked up by overwhelming forces. Actually, both humans and Rulls, captured or facing capture, were conditioned to kill themselves. Rulls did it by a mental willing that had never been circumvented. Men had to use mechanical methods, and in some cases that had proved impossible. The result was that Rulls had had occasional opportunities to experiment on living, conscious men.

  Unless he was bested, before he could get organized, here was a priceless opportunity to try some tests on Rulls—and without delay. Every moment of daylight must be utilized to the uttermost limit

  Jamieson put on his special “defensive” belts, and went outside.

  The dawn was brightening minute by minute; and the vistas that revealed themselves with each increment of light power held him, even as he tensed his body for the fight ahead. Why, he thought, in a sharp, excited wonder, all this is happening on the strangest mountain ever known.

  Mount Monolith, discovered at the same time as the planet, two years before, had been named in the first words spoken about it. “Look at that monolith down there!” On a level plain that column stood, and reared up precipitously to a height of eight thousand two hundred feet. The most majestic pillar in the known universe, it easily qualified as one of the hundred natural wonders of the galaxy.

  Standing there, Jamieson felt, not for the first time, the greatness of man’s destiny. Defender and ally of thousands of life-forms, chief enemy of the encroaching Rull menace— In his eighteen years of military service he had gazed on many alien scenes. He had walked the soil of planets two hundred thousand light-years from Earth. As head of the fleet’s science division, he had been absolute commander—under law and regulation— of ships so powerful that whole groups of inhabited worlds were helpless before their irresistible might—ships that flashed from the eternal night into the blazing brightness of suns red and suns blue, suns yellow and white and orange and violet, suns so wonderful and different that no previous imaginings could match the reality.

  Yet, despite the greatness of his rank, here he stood on a mountain on far Laertes, one man compelled by circumstance to pit his cunning against one or more of the supremely intelligent Rull enemy. The information about the discovery of the Laertes planet had been relayed to him through the usual routine channels. Instantly he had seen what the others had missed, that it would be a key base against either galactic hemisphere. Since battleships did not normally carry the type of planetary oryctologist who could make a co-ordinated survey, he had not hesitated to step into the breach.

  Even as it was, the first great advantage was already lost.

  Jamieson shook himself grimly. It was time to launch his attack—and discover the opposition that could be mustered against him.

  That was Step One, and the important point about it was to insure that it wasn’t also Step Last.

  ~ * ~

  By the time the Laertes sun peered palely over the horizon that was the northeast cliff’s edge, the assault was under way. The automatic defensors, which he had set up the night before, moved slowly from point to point ahead of the mobile blaster.

  Jamieson cautiously saw to it that one of the three defensors also brought up his rear. He augmented that basic protection by crawling from one projecting rock after another. The machines he manipulated from a tiny hand control, which was connected to the visiplates that poked out from his headgear just above his eyes. With tensed eyes, he watched the wavering needles that would indicate movement or that the defensor screens were being subjected to energy opposition.

  Nothing happened.

  As he came within sight of the Rull craft, Jamieson stalled his attack, while he seriously pondered the problem of no resistance. He didn’t like it. It was possible that all the Rulls aboard had been killed, but he doubted it mightily. Rulls were almost boneless. Except for half a dozen strategically linked cartilages, they were all muscle.

  With bleak eyes, Jamieson studied the wreck through the telescopic eyes of one of the defensors. It lay in a shallow indentation, its nose buried in a wall of gravel. Its lower plates were collapsed versions of the original. His single energy blast the evening before, completely automatic though it had been, had really dealt a smashing blow to the Rull ship.

  The over-all effect was of utter lifelessness. If it was a trick, then it was a very skillful one. Fortunately, there were tests he could make, not absolutely final but evidential and indicative.

  He made them.

  The echoless height of the most unique mountain ever discovered hummed with the fire-sound of the mobile blaster. The noise grew to a roar as the unit’s pile warmed to its task, and developed its maximum kilo curie activity.

  Under that barrage, the hull of the enemy craft trembled a little and changed color slightly, but that was all. After ten minutes, Jamieson cut the power, and sat baffled and indecisive.

  The defensive screens of the Rull ship were full on. Had they gone on automatically after his first shot of the evening before? Or had they been put up deliberately to nullify just such an attack as this?

  He couldn’t be sure. That was the trouble; he had no positive knowledge. The Rull could be lying inside dead. (Odd, how he was beginning to think in terms of one rather than several, but he had a conviction that two live Rulls would not be cautious in dealing with one human being—of course, they couldn’t be absolutely sure there was only one.) It could be wounded and incapable of doing anything against him. It could have spent the night marking up the tableland with elled nerve control lines —he’d have to make sure he never looked directly at the ground —or it could simply be waiting for the arrival of the greater ship that had dropped it onto the planet.

  ~ * ~

  Jamieson refused to consider the last possibility. That way was death, without qualification or hope.

  Frowningly, he studied the visible damage he had done the ship. All the hard metals had held together, so far as he could see, but the whole bottom of the ship was dented to a depth that varied from one to four feet. Some radiation must have got in, and the question was, what would it have damaged?

  He had examined dozens of captured Rull survey craft, and if this one ran to the pattern, then in the front would be the control center, with a sealed off blaster chamber. In the rear the engine room, two storerooms, one for fuel and equipment, the other for food and—

  For food. Jamieson jumped, and then with wide eyes noted how the food section had suffered greater damage than any other part of the ship.

  Surely, surely, some radiation must have got into it, poisoning it, ruining it, and instantly putting the Rull, with his swift digestive system, into a deadly position.

  Jamieson sighed with the intensity of his hope, and prepared to retreat. As he turned away, quite incidentally, accidentally, he glanced at the rock behind which he had shielded himself from possible direct fire.

  Glanced at it, and saw the elled lines in it. Intricate lines, based on a profound and inhuman study of the human nervous system. Jamieson recognized them, and stiffened in horror. He thought in anguish: Where, where am I supposed to fall? Which cliff?

  With a desperate will, with all his strength, he fought to retain his senses a moment longer. He strove to see the lines again. He saw, briefly, flashingly, five vertical and above them three lines that pointed east with their wavering ends.

  The pressure built up, up, up inside him, but still he fought to keep his thoughts moving. Fought to remember if there were any wide ledges near the top of the east cliff.

  There were. He recalled them in a final agony of hope. There, he t
hought. That one, that one, Let me fall on that one. He strained to hold the ledge image he wanted, and to repeat, repeat the command that might save his life. His last, dreary thought was that here was the answer to his doubts. The Rull was alive.

  Blackness came like a curtain of pure essence of night.

  ~ * ~

  From the far galaxy had he come, a cold, remorseless leader of leaders, the yeli, Meeesh, the Iiin of Ria, the high Aaish of the Yeell. And other titles, and other positions, and power. Oh, the power that he had, the power of death, the power of life and the power of the Leard ships.

  He came in his great anger to discover what was wrong. A thousand years before the command had been given: Expand into the Second galaxy. Why were they-who-could-not-be-more-perfect so slow in carrying out these instructions? What was the nature of the two-legged creatures whose multitudinous ships, impregnable planetary bases and numerous allies had fought those-who-possessed-Nature’s-supreme-nervous-system to an impasse?